


Bullet to the Brain Pan

by igrockspock



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Episode: The Writing on the Wall, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2862014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye's father is a murderer, and she took the same alien serum that made everyone else crazy.  How could she <em>not</em> worry that she's a danger to the team?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bullet to the Brain Pan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).



> For geckoholic, who wanted a story about chosen family, May's stories, and Skye coping with her mysterious past.
> 
> Set after episode 2x07: The Writing on the Wall

Skye's father is a murderer.

No, actually, she wishes her father was _just_ a murderer, but he's more than that -- a torturer, a sadist, a butcher, something evil. And really, what had she imagined? Hadn't she watched enough shitty daytime TV to know that adoption reunions don't exactly go smoothly? 

"Out with it," May says, and Skye's head snaps up. 

"Out with what?" Skye asks. She'd been curled into the copilot's seat, chewing her nails and staring at the floor, secure in the knowledge that May of all people would never force her into an emotional conversation.

May gives her a look. "I can hear you thinking," she says.

"Well, maybe what I'm thinking about isn't your business," Skye says, willing herself not to flinch. She defies May pretty much never.

"It is if you fuck up the mission."

"I'm not going to fuck up the mission." Hadn't she spent the last sixteen hours with her eyes glued to files and reports? May had practically propped her eyelids open with toothpicks so that she could stay awake and learn everything there was to know about fucking Baku.

"If your mind's not on the mission, you're going to fuck up the mission." May shoots Skye another look, one that brooks no defiance. "So again I say, out with it."

"My dad's a murderer," Skye says. She doesn't choke on the words, but it's a near thing.

"Yes," May says evenly. "And you might be an alien."

Skye makes an indignant noise, and May shrugs. "Just getting it all out there," she says.

"I don't really care about that part," Skye admits. The whole alien thing is too fantastical to even wrap her head around. Even thinking about it makes her feel like she might be crazy, like SHIELD might just be some figment of an elaborate hallucinatory disorder and she's going to wake up strapped to a gurney in a padded room. Did they even _put_ gurneys in padded rooms? Probably not. Probably you went to the padded room if you were ambulatory, possibly in a straight jacket.

May taps her fingers lightly against the control panel, and Skye gives up her mental patient reverie.

"I care about the murderer part," she says, not bothering to keep her annoyance out of her voice. Why does she have to fucking explain this? Oh right, because May is a robot. Possibly literally. It wouldn't be particularly surprising.

"Why do you care?" May asks.

 _Yup, robot,_ Skye thinks.

" _Seriously_?" Skye asks. "Are you telling me you wouldn't be upset if your father killed people for fun?"

"I'd be very upset, considering he can barely move or speak since his last stroke," May says. Her expression doesn't even waver. "But I want to know why _you're_ upset."

Skye looks down at her hands. "Because if he's a murderer, what does that make me?"

"Nothing," May says quickly. "He didn't raise you. He's never even met you. Unless you believe that fate is pre-determined -- in which case I doubt you'd be here -- his life has nothing to do with you."

"It's not that simple," Skye says. You can't take the universe and distill it into logic like that. Messy things happen. The last six months of their lives certainly prove that.

"It _is_ simple," May says. She stares out at the blue sky ahead of them, and Skye unlatches her seatbelt, preparing to get up. She'd come here to _avoid_ talking about things, not to be lectured on the stupidity of her feelings.

"Sit down," May says, never mind that Skye hadn't actually even gotten up. "I killed eighteen people with my bare hands. On one day. How many people have you killed?"

"One," Skye says, "but I don't see how that matters."

"Oh, it matters. There's not a day that goes by that I don't see their faces when I fall asleep. Every one of them. But I'm not a murderer. I choose not to be." She looks over at Skye. "It really is simple. You're already choosing who you want to be. If you don't want to be a murderer, don't kill people without a good reason."

***

They've been back from Baku for a week. The mission was a personal and professional success: they'd infiltrated a Hydra base, and Skye hadn't killed anyone for profit or pleasure. And now that the mission's over, she's free to resume her preferred operating hours, which means staying up late at night and spending plenty of daylight hours on her computer for good measure. If she doesn't see much of the team, that's not really her fault; they're free to develop the sleeping schedule of a vampire or challenge her to Halo anytime.

Or they can wake up freakishly early and insist on having breakfast with her before she goes to bed. That's what May does.

"Still worried you're suddenly going to start killing people?" she asks, sliding into the seat across from Skye.

“I’ve got my father’s DNA and I took the John Garett crazy serum,” Skye says, not bothering to look up from her laptop. “It would be irresponsible _not_ to worry.”

"Well, you can stop. You won't kill anyone," May says implacably.

Skye looks up from her laptop. "How can you possibly know that?" 

"I would kill you before you got the chance," May says, sliding a bowl of cereal and a sliced-up apple across the table to Skye, who ignores them.

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?" she asks.

May shrugs. "It's honest."

"You wouldn't, like, capture me and try to fix me?" That had been the only comforting part of her renegade alien nightmares. She'd pictured herself learning to live with crushing guilt, not dying quickly at the hands of her SO.

May shrugs again. "Probably not. Coulson, I would. But the rest of you, probably not. So you'll have to make sure you don't kill people."

***

Maybe the whole _I would totally kill you_ conversation is a pretext to force Skye to talk to the rest of the team. If so, it worked. Coulson's in closed-door meetings all day, but that's never been an obstacle for Skye. She just wedges her foot in the door when someone else is trying to leave.

"Does May have the driest sense of humor in the entire world?" she asks.

Coulson blinks. "Are you saying her sense of humor is drier than mine?" 

Skye closes her eyes and concentrates on keeping her heartbeat even. “Just so you know, I hate you all.”

“What did she say to you?”

“Not to worry about becoming some kind of alien psycho killer because she’d kill me first. Is that a threat or does she genuinely think that’s reassuring?”

Coulson shrugs. “A little from column A, a little from column B.”

“Is _that_ supposed to be reassuring?”

“It’s honest,” Phil says. His gaze never wavers, and Skye wonders how she’d ended up working for a team of robots.

“That’s what she said too,” Skye says. “Well, that and she’d kill any of us who became a threat except for you.” 

Coulson sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You know, I really thought she and I were finished with that conversation.”

***

Getting locked in the cargo hold of the bus is actually not a terrible distraction from Skye’s existential crisis. Without her computer or the internet, she’s pretty well separated from her research, and watching May pace back and forth is surprisingly entertaining.

“Mac’s going to get us out, you know,” Skye says.

May shoots her a look. “ _When?_ ”

“I don’t know. As soon as he can rewire whatever security system we tripped.” Without regular access to SHIELD and its elite mechanics, the bus has gotten pretty fickle. Mac does his best to keep up, but it’s not really meant to be a one-man job.

Skye watches May prowl restlessly for a few more minutes before she says, “You really suck at downtime. And no, that is not an invitation to spar again. I don’t think my kidneys can take it.”

“I can spare your kidneys,” May says conversationally. “It would be an interesting challenge.”

“In which I would die. No more than one physical combat lesson per day, the doctor said.”

“And in real combat -- “

“The bad guys won’t have a limit on how often they fight me. Yeah, I get it. Doesn’t mean I’m going to be your personal punching bag just because you’re bored.” Skye tucks herself into the corner of a bench, hugging her knees to her chest. “You could tell me a story. You’ve got to have some good ones.”

May rolls her eyes. "You're like the little sister I never begged my mother to have."

Skye snickers. "And you're like the big sister whose hair I set on fire."

"You didn't set anyone's hair on fire."

"How do you know?"

"It's not your MO."

"Okay, fine, but I did offer to play beauty shop with my foster sister once. It ended really badly for her." She nudges May with her toe. "So tell me a story."

"Or you'll cut my hair?"

"Or you'll keep bantering with me. You decide which one is more horrifying."

May sighs. “Once upon a time, I went to Chile.”

“That’s an exciting story,” Skye says, and May rolls her eyes.

“Do you want to hear the story or not?” she snaps.

“Okay, I’ll behave. You went to Chile, and then what?”

“I’d picked out this little town on the beach, and it was perfect -- quiet, laidback, huge arch ways made of stone floating out in the middle of the sea. Exactly what we wanted, except--”

“Wait. You said _we_. Who’s we?”

“My ex-husband.” Skye’s eyes light up, and May rolls her eyes yet again. “Yes, I was married. We traveled together. It’s really not as interesting as you think it was.”

Skye smiles. “No questions about the ex. Check. So what was wrong with the town? Swarming with enemy agents?”

“Nope. At least none that we saw. The problem was that the bus company lost our bags, the ATM ate our card, and nobody spoke English.”

“Are you telling me that Melinda May, international woman of mystery, doesn’t speak Spanish?”

“Not a word,” May admits, a smile ghosting around the edges of her lips. “Well, I can ask for the bathroom, but that’s about it. There actually _was_ one person who spoke English in the village. It was the mime who was performing in the square. No matter how many times we asked him to help us, he wouldn’t stop pretending to be trapped in a box.”

“Did you kill him?” Skye asks.

“No,” May says, an unidentifiable expression flickering on her face. Skye remembers their conversation earlier, about the number of people May had killed. Her stomach twists but May’s mask is back in place long before Skye can think of anything to say. 

“We slept on the beach that night,” May says. “It was actually sort of romantic, with the moonlight and the waves crashing in. Except that it was cold, and a lot of sand got in places it wasn’t meant to be. But in the morning, some fishermen saw us and helped us cook one of their fish on a campfire, and their mother let us sleep in her spare room. The next day, she called her brother the professor, and he came to help us get our card and our bags back.”

Skye blinks. She’s still waiting for the part where May and her husband saved a baby from a shark or defeated their arch nemesis with nothing but a paperclip and a ball of twine. But then the door hisses open and Mac’s on the other side, grinning triumphantly.

“Dammit,” she says. “Now I’m never going to hear the end of the story.”

May looks at her strangely, and Skye realizes that _was_ the story -- just a bad day that turned out okay in the end. She spends an hour trying to dissect it before she realizes that it wasn’t supposed to have point. It’s a story for a friend, not a learning exercise for a student. That makes her feel strangely better about her relationship with May, but it doesn’t stop the nightmares from coming that night. There are no monsters, no dripping blood, no chases through unending corridors. Instead, she and May are eating breakfast together, and then May points a gun at her heart and says, “time to put you down.”

Skye wakes up with the gunshot reverberating in her head.

***

May is being _nice_ to her. Not in the sparring ring, of course, but afterward. She orders anchovy pizza even though Skye is the only one who likes it. Her favorite kind of sushi appears for dinner. When Skye asks about her ex, May grudgingly agrees to answer a single question. The kindness ought to make her feel better, but it actually makes things worse. _One day you give me pizza, the next you put a bullet in my head_ , Skye thinks. The disparity is too big to process.

She doesn’t mean to ask. May has made it more than clear that she doesn’t want to talk about Skye’s father, her insecurities, or her possible execution anymore. But they’re eating breakfast together, just like they always are in Skye’s dreams, and the words tumble out before she can stop them.

“Would you actually kill me if I were a threat?” Her voice is smaller than she wants it to be.

“Yes,” May says without hesitation. “Just like I’ll drop you from a mission if your head isn’t screwed on right, and I’ll drop you from this team if I think you’re incompetent. As long as you are my trainee, you are responsible for not killing people. And I will hold you to that responsibility, just like I hold you to all the other ones.”

"What if I can't stop myself?” Skye asks. “What if I’m like Garrett, and one day I just snap?"

May rolls her eyes. “Then I’ll kill you. But it’s not going to happen. You are nothing like John Garrett. The serum didn’t make Garrett a killer. He was a coward and a traitor and a murderer long before. How many times do we need to have this conversation?”

 _Until you sound upset about killing me,_ Skye thinks. Not that that’s going to happen. Demanding emotion from May is pretty much futile. 

“Whatever it is, you might as well just say it,” May says. There’s an angry edge in her voice that says she’s not going to wait.

“You might try and sound like you’d care about killing me,” Skye snaps. 

“Is _that_ what this is really about?” May asks.

“ _Of course_ that’s what this is about,” Skye says. She’d already had to surrender her illusions about her father; she doesn’t want to think that her belief in May is an illusion too.

“This is worse than a conversation with my ex-husband, for the record,” May says. Her voice is calm, and Skye hates her for it. “ _If_ I actually thought I would have to kill you, I would be upset. But I won’t have to kill you. You’re not a monster, Skye, you’re an alien, or you’re gifted, or whatever term you want to use. But you’re not like the rest of us.”

“What the fuck?” Skye is actually yelling now. “How can you possibly think that telling someone they’re an alien makes everything okay?”

“Because it _does_ make everything okay," May says with impatient tone she usually reserves for Hunter. "You haven’t reacted to the serum the way Coulson and Garrett did because it’s already part of you.”

“You’re seriously saying you wouldn’t care if you were an alien?” Skye asks.

“No, I wouldn’t." May looks her straight in the eye in that unnerving way that says anyone who wants to argue with her is going to end up dead. " _If_ I were lucky, I would get about two minutes of existential crisis before my mother reminded me that she raised me, I’m still her daughter, and I need the fuck over myself and move on with my life.”

“Yeah, well, nobody raised me, and I don’t have a family except for the bloodthirsty monster who apparently shares my DNA. So forgive me for being stuck on the existential crisis.” Skye pushes her chair back from the table and stands up. She's _done_ with May telling her that her feelings are stupid.

Of course, May stands up too.

“You don’t think that _we_ are a family? All of this, all the training, Phil risking his life to get you the serum -- and you don’t think we’re your family?” May practically spits the words, and Skye flinches.

“You’re angry,” she says slowly.

“You’re damn right I’m angry. I will _always_ be angry when you underestimate yourself.”

“Because you’re my family?” Skye asks, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

May narrows her eyes, but there’s a smile curling around the edge of her lips. “Well, you did just try to flounce dramatically away from the table. I'd say that puts you in overwrought teenage territory, wouldn't you?And if it had been anyone but you, I would have watched you go happily and eaten my breakfast in peace..”

Skye can feel her face turning red. Her bowl of half-eaten cereal is in her hand, and her napkin is wadded in her fist, and yeah -- she's not exactly the poster child for maturity. It's hard to know what to say after that.

May slides back into her seat smoothly and glances at Skye over her waffle. "Sit down and finish your damn breakfast. And let's never speak of this again."


End file.
